bloak

That's right. I think for political reasons Northern Ireland has to have the same time as Ireland and the same time as Britain.

And Scotland has to have GMT in the winter so that school children don't have to walk to school in the dark. (Suffering and deaths were caused when they experimentally tried UTC+1 in the Scottish winter.)

Therefore, if you want to get rid of clock changes it really has to be GMT for the whole of the British Isles. I think that would work for me. But I'd rather stick with the current system than make any other change, like UTC+1 all year or Britain different from Ireland.

I think it's usually the other way around: older people are more affected by time changes, and by jet lag.

We don't know yet, of course, but I have the impression that the century in which things changed most was the century from about 1865 to about 1965. Stuff seems to have slowed down a bit since then. But it's all subjective, really: it depends on what you think is important.

> How cool are you with the odds of your entire family surviving the next 100 years standing at about 10%?

My entire family (for my natural interpretation of that expression) is aged over 20 so I don't expect any of them to survive the next 100 years.

I tend to support VHEMT anyway!

There is strong opposition to nuclear energy in Germany, which I disagree with, but I don't think "climate change advocates" (whatever the heck they are) have anything to do with it.

I would guess that "the shortest" just means the shortest in a group of suspects, for example if you're explaining that the shortest in the group had red hair and the tallest had a glass eye.

I am, yes! Thanks for the correction! I thought it was an #if expression, but it presumably isn't. (You can expand arbitrary macros in an #if expression, but it's not often done.)

Preprocessor constant expressions are evaluated with at least the range of the largest integer type available at run time. The C standard requires that "long" have at least 32 bits. So a shift right by 30 in a preprocessor constant expression looks good to me.

> The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost

Interestingly, a French-speaking Canadian who has spent some time in France told me that his right to use the French language is better protected in Canada than it is in France. He thinks that this is a consequence of the reciprocality implied by having more than one official language: French speakers in Canada get the same rights as English speakers, so people are happy to grant rights in return for getting them, whereas in France everyone gets screwed and you end up with a situation in which a French person wanting to do a PhD on French history at a French university has to write their grant application in English.

According to GDP per capita, Spain is below Italy, but above Portugal. Has its position changed much over the last century? I would be interested to see a measure of that, but how far back is it feasible to estimate GDP per capita?

I don't know how Spain was affected by WW2, but they had a very nasty civil war just before WW2. I'm not sure if that's relevant to GDP per capita, though, because a war can sometimes improve the economy by leading to the overflow of a system in which progress is blocked by a relatively rich ruling class.

Seeing as the Bible is a Manual of Genocide I'm not sure about that.

It wasn't a semantic argument; it was a question, or two questions.

It's possible, in fact likely, that the Budesamt für Verfassungsschutz has a clear idea of what rechtsextrem (I'm guessing that's the term they use) means but I certainly don't!

Technically, I think, that first sentence, by Austen, uses a passive participle but does not use a passive voice for any finite verb. I don't think that advice to avoid "the passive" is intended to apply to that situation.

For example, nobody would seriously suggest avoiding the passive participle in a sentence like "Put the broken plate in the bin". ("Put the plate that someone broke into the bin"?)

LLMs are impressively multilingual, though. I just asked ChatGPT a question and told it to reply in Latin. It seems to have done a reasonable job, though it's hard for me to judge: I suspect it knows Latin a lot better than I do.

One thing I might try, when I have some spare time, is see to what extent ChatGPT "understands" the difference between British and American English and is capable of using the variety I prefer. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that ChatGPT is better at writing "pure" British English than the average British teenager in this day and age. Has anyone, by any chance, already experimented with anything like that? Like I say, I haven't tried the experiment yet, but it seems like a good fit for the sort of thing that LLMs are good at.

"I before E except after C, but only when the sound is E" is the version I've heard, so "weird" (and "weir") are not exceptions. (In standard British English the vowel in "weird" is /ɪə/, not /iː/.)

"Codex could not find bubblewrap on PATH. Install bubblewrap with your OS package manager. See the sandbox prerequisites: ... Codex will use the bundled bubblewrap in the meantime."

I think neither the bundled bubblewrap nor the Ubuntu 24.04 bubblewrap works properly under Docker with the default options ... Yes, I've just tested that by asking Codex to "Test that bubblewrap is working properly" and then "Test again" after apt-get install bubblewrap.

EDIT: So the solution is to run "codex --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox" in a Docker container?

It says "requesting sexual content of a minor". I'm not sure how to parse that. My brain is jumping back and forth between "requesting stuff from a minor" and "stuff that is inside a minor".

Bubblewrap gets a bit confused inside a Docker container. If anyone knows how to run Codex inside a Docker container on Linux without it constantly complaining about a broken bubblewrap, please tell.

I never thought of the DVR as a particularly significant development. I thought of it as just a replacement for the VCR. That's what it was for me. But perhaps in some areas DVRs were used to a greater extent than VCRs had been?

That rule wouldn't work very well if the person who destroyed the evidence isn't the person suspected of the crime and it is unclear whether the person who destroyed the evidence is a friend or an enemy of the suspect. So I think a sane legal system would want to punish the person who destroyed the evidence rather than jeopardise the fair trial of the suspect.

Rare, certainly: there are plenty of vanity publications that were chucked into the bin by almost everyone who was unlucky enough to be given a copy. Precious? Well, with the help of an electronic friend I found ISBN 978-3-8365-7349-8. Apparently a copy of that book is worth about £40k. Can anyone beat that?

(EDIT: I'm assuming "precious" means the same as valuable here to make the question easier to answer. In fact, of course, people usually say "precious" when they mean a personal or emotional attachment or cultural importance rather than economic value.)

Since you seem to know about this, what are the actual rules about "destruction of evidence" in your jurisdiction? What does the accused need to have known for a crime to have been committed?

(Common sense tells me that the accusation might make sense both in cases in which the accused knows about a crime and in cases in which the accused knows about a police investigation, even in the absence of a crime, but deleting nude photographs to stop a customs officer from seeing them, for a random example, would that be a crime?)

Which country are you in? Here in GB it is expected that dogs will be under control, and in any case their owners are responsible for any damage they do. Cats on the other hand ... people have devices to scare away cats, though I'm not sure how well they work. Interestingly, cat owners have them in some cases ... to keep their own cat away from certain areas?

I don't know much about the USSR but I'll just put this here:

1. If the children didn't have enough vitamin D, wouldn't a pill be a much cheaper and easier solution?

2. There seem to be other possible reasons for prescribing treatment with ultraviolet light because I seem to recall a case of someone (in England, half a century ago) having that recommended for some kind of skin condition.

On the other hand, if everything about you is boring, that in itself may begin to seem suspicious. "I borrowed this old phone from my stepson because my own phone got run over by a steamroller at a vintage vehicle show" is the sort of thing an actual spy or criminal would never say.

There are so many different options, it's confusing. But a "proper" 7 kW charger can cost over £2000 to install if your house isn't wired in a convenient way, while installing an ordinary socket outside might cost about a tenth of that and give you 2.3 kW. You might get about 4.5 miles per kWh, so potentially more than 80 miles from an 8-hour overnight charge from an ordinary 230 V socket, which can deliver 10 A for a long time if it's a modern one and properly installed though you need to be a bit careful because it's not normal to take that much current from an ordinary socket and you'd be doing this at night so you should worry a bit about something overheating and catching fire. Worth getting someone competent to take a look at the wiring, I'd say.

Basically, as far as I can tell, you can take 10 amps off lots of places in an ordinary modern house, but to get 32 amps for a "proper" EV charger you probably need to go back to where the power supply enters the house and start there afresh with new and rather more expensive equipment and cables.

(US readers note that I'm talking about GB where domestic wiring is all 230 V.)

It was expressed in a strange way but I assume what they meant was that if the former student goes bankrupt within the 7-year period then the student loan is not cancelled.

I'm being pedantic here, of course, but "nation-states" is perhaps not the right expression to use for that era. Nation states are primarily a thing of the nineteenth century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state). The article seems to talk about "imperial states" and "palace states", and I'm not sure I've ever seen the expression "palace state" before.